Ben Wright shares a single qualifying question that boosts close rates by 20% and cuts wasted quoting time. Ask prospects if they're ready to move forward now or still evaluating. If they're ready, accelerate the quote. If not, shift to consultative selling to solve their real obstacles first.
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In this episode, we're going to look at how you can close 20% more sales without wasting time quoting by using just one qualifying question. Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping 7 to 8 figure trade, construction, and industry sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host, Ben Wright, and over the last 15 years, I've helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses, and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes. Let's get started. Today we're going to have a really short and punchy podcast that focuses on the single qualifying question that I have seen impact more sales than any other qualifying question across my career, and then why it's so important for you to think about how you can apply it to your team. Now qualifying questions are so important when it comes to dealing with leads. So qualifying questions for most businesses, they traditionally and typically follow questioning around the lines of how much are you looking to spend? What's the size of your project? Where are you based? Who's making the decision? What are the things that are important to get done? That's a really good qualifying question, I should say, by the way. When are you ready to move forward? Those type of things. However, there's one question that— well, and to be fair, a lot of those questions dance around it, but there's one question that I think supersedes each and every one of those when it comes to help us reduce the amount of time we waste on quoting. And before we get into it, I'll give you an example. I was working with a trade-based business, so it's a business that I'd worked with for a couple of years now, and they were very much in the construction phase of businesses. So they weren't building new homes, but they were building, or they were doing renovations with customers. So generally they were quite chunky projects and these customers finding that they were quoting and quoting and quoting and quoting, but they weren't losing many deals. Unfortunately, they weren't winning many deals either. So they had this great big bucket of work that was quoted and stuck in inertia. And what I mean by inertia is deals that just weren't going anywhere. It wasn't a yes, but it wasn't a no. And worth thinking about yourself. You've ever had those situations where you feel like you have this great big pipeline of deals where they're in the mix. And I remember this salesperson saying to me quite consistently, yeah, they're in the mix, they're in the mix, right? But they're actually not moving anywhere. And they, for me, are the worst types of deals to have in your pipeline because you invest more and more and more time in them, but they don't go anywhere versus deals that quickly get a yes or quickly get a no and you can move on. And particularly when you get a no, you can look at where you need to improve and then go on to what's next. And after unpacking over a course of a few weeks what was going on here, what we realized is that this customer of ours, this renovation business, was actually quoting deals that they weren't sure if they were gonna proceed or not. So there were deals where the customer was just looking. And from there for me came a real aha moment. This was quite a while ago, but came a real aha moment where I sat down and said, you know what, it's so important for us as a team and as a business that we are asking our customer if they're ready now or if they're just looking. And that, in essence, is this really simple qualifying question that I now roll out with every single business I work with, and that is to ascertain if a customer is ready to go now or if they're just looking. And let me step through how this works through qualifying questions. And I, I'll be really clear, is this doesn't replace any other qualifying questions, but it's the most important qualifying question to make sure we ask each and every time. And let me step through, as I said, how this can evolve. So the question goes, we'll use this renovation business where a customer calls them up and says, hey, I'm looking to have my deck extended. We want to break a room out into two rooms and we want to do some work in the garage, right? We want to build a study in the garage, whatever it may be. That's a very moderate size renovation, right? Or if you want to step it up to a bit larger, we can call it a renovation where they want to include a second story on their house, right? And the question, amongst other qualifying questions, goes, okay, fantastic. So is this a renovation that you are ready to move on and it's just time to now pick your partner that you want to work with? Or are you in the phase where you're still inquiring and working out if it's viable for you? If the customer comes back and says, yeah, we're definitely going ahead, we've got our plans, we've got the architects done, we're in with council now, or we're waiting on some of your quotes depending on the council requirements of where you are, right? We're waiting on these quotes to get in, then we're going to put that approval in and we're ready to go. Right. And in this instance, we have a customer that can show by action that they are committed to a renovation. And in this instance, it's Rolltruck. Sales process moves forward as fast as you can, creating value through a really robust sales process. If you didn't listen to the last podcast, number 209, please go and do it, right? But you move ahead, great, straight ahead, move forward. The other option, if someone's to come back and say, look, we are still working out what we need to do, we're not 100% sure we want to go with the renovation yet, but we think it's likely to happen. In this instance, there should be an immediate switch in the sales process. And it's a switch from, great, let me come out, let me get your quote ready and let's get this thing moving, to, okay, great, thank you for sharing that with me. What are the things that you need to work out before you can press go? What are the things that you need to tick off before you can be confident that you're gonna do this renovation? Is there anything that's gonna get in the way of you actually saying, yeah, we wanna do it? And for you as the provider, the salesperson, the business, the partner, it gives you an opportunity to actually work with your customer to help them resolve any outstanding issues, right, that have stopped them getting to the point where they're ready to go. For some, it'll be budget. So you can talk around what a typical renovation like that would look like and where they might be able to save money, reduce cost, right, where they might be able to reduce scope of the works or perhaps the specification of fittings on the works, right? And you can start to work with them through that process. It becomes very collaborative and you're building a relationship. It might be that they don't understand a renovation. They don't know if it's possible. They don't know what their council requirements are. They don't know how long it's going to take. They don't know the impact that it might have on them and their family, or if it's a business, on how they can work within that business. So by understanding that they're not quite ready to go, it gives you the opportunity to partner with them to get them to the point where they are ready for quotes. Because if you're going in there and you quote at a million miles an hour, you know, you speed, create value through a great process, Unfortunately, the biggest thing that might be wrong here is your timing. And if your timing's wrong, it can often lead to your specifications or your scope being wrong, because as the customer goes through that journey, they decide on different things. It might be that they move from doing just the decking out the back and some rooms to also refreshing the laundry and the bathroom that are adjacent to the deck, right? Things can change really quickly, and if you're not engaged in that scope and you're not providing the value according to exactly what the customer wants, then you're gonna miss out. So for me, this qualifying question is by far the most important. Are you ready to go, or are you just looking? Because all the others are pretty straightforward, and we can roll through those. But when we know if a customer's good to go now or needs a bit more guidance before they can get to that point, then we put ourselves into a position of power because we are actually working with them around what they want. So my encouragement from today is to add that qualifying question into your list of qualifying questions. You can ask it first or you can ask it last depending on your preference. And of course, ask it in your own way. Are you ready to go now or do you still have a few things to decide on before you can move forward? Right? Ask that in your own way. But what I'm hoping you'll take out of today is that you roll that straight into your qualifying questions and away you go. Of course, I'm grateful for you listening at a minimum, but if you can take that as one action point, don't let tomorrow get in the way of today, right? Take that 1% better every day approach. That's perfect. At the same time, if you are frustrated though that you're spending hours of wasted time on sales quotes and you keep losing or you keep getting inertia results that we've just spoken about, then it's unlikely that if you don't change something that your results would change, right? And they're obviously really stressful, particularly when you've got a pipeline that's building and not closing. So what I do to help our podcast listeners is I've got a free quote audit that pinpoints exactly why you're not winning more jobs and what you need to do to increase your close rates quickly. All you need to do is click on the free quote audit link. It's in the show notes and you can get started on it now. That's it for today. Look forward to our next episode. Bye for now.
